Eaton, NY -- Michael Johnston has been raising queens for 35 years. Queen bees, that is.

The queens, not honey, are the main source of income at Johnston’s Honeybee Farm in southern Madison County. They’re sold to beekeepers throughout New York state for $20 apiece. He also gets $80 to $90 for what Johnston calls a nuc — short for nucleus hive: a package with a queen and a patented four-frame system that includes honey and bees.

“If it wasn’t for raising queens, I might not have been able to stay in business,” Johnston said.

The business has grown over the past seven years from 100 to 200 hives.

In 2009, Johnston’s mite-resistant bees produced 6,000 pounds of light amber, summer wildflower honey, made with basswood, knapweed and clover. He attributes the mild flavor to the sweet soil around his farm in the town of Eaton.

Honey is available at the farmstand, 3653 state Route 26, with prices starting at $3 for a 12-ounce jar. A new honey house at the farm uses gravity processing to produce raw honey.

It’s done in his spare time, away from distractions, such as his full-time job with the Madison County Soil and Water Conservation District. “I’m working on getting retired to concentrate on the bees,” Johnston said. Concentrating on bees can be painful. While some days, Johnston says, he’s stung “hardly at all,” it is not uncommon to “get stung a couple hundred times in a day working with bees with no gloves.”

He averages about 20 stings a day but boasts that “I don’t swell up.”

The process of raising bees is a skill Johnston acquired in California, where he worked 10 years for commercial bee and queen producers. It takes 11 days to raise a queen cell, Johnston said. At that point he places the queen cells into small nucleus hives. Fourteen days later, he has a laying queen.

Johnston, who has a bachelor’s degree in botany from Syracuse University, said he started getting more serious about bees in 2003, turning his hobby into a viable business venture.

Since then, Johnston has received two grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.

“When I do get rid of my full-time job,” he said, “I will have a workplace.”